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GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) comes into effect on the 25th of May 2018 radically changing our approach to processing personal data. With less than six months remaining, we know you’re in the midst of GDPR preparations updating and/or replacing the ways in which you collect, process or control personally identifiable data. We hope this article helps to ease this process by answering some of your probing IT (GDPR related) questions.

What is Personal Data? Definition (Source: CNIL Website)

“According to the law, personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual; an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number (e.g. social security number) or one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity (e.g. name and first name, date of birth, biometrics data, fingerprints, DNA…)”

Other Examples of Personally Identifiable Data Include:

Email Address

Medical Information

Bank Details

IP Address

Cultural Identity

National Insurance Number, etc.

Your IT hardware, software, processes and strategies are key to ensuring your sensitive data remains protected. As an experienced IT Support Provider, Compucare can identify IT threats and ensure your systems are resilient in the light of GDPR requirements. We can support your organisation in such key areas as: data encryption, data backup, firewall, anti-virus and other security services, breach notifications and more.

When GDPR becomes effective organisations must be able to discover, manage and share data belonging to their customers, employees, donors, etc. The above mentioned individuals will be entitled to require answers relating to how much information you hold about them and how it’s being used. Most likely, you’re already using certain IT solutions which can assist your organisation in discovering, managing, protecting and reporting data. For example, it is a legal requirement that all organisations create procedures to limit who has got access to shared files hosted on various platforms e.g. Dropbox or SharePoint. However, please contact us if you’re not sure what IT solutions you already have, or may need to put in place by the 25th of May 2018.

Additional IT (GDPR related) Tips for Your Organisation

Make sure your staff are adequately trained:

From an IT compliance perspective, your employees must be able to recognise some of the main threats and/or data breaches. Quite often, breaches occur due to employee errors, hence staff need to be sufficiently educated. Please subscribe Right Hereand receive our free “How to Spot a Malicious Email” Guide.

Take advantage of strong passwords:

If your passwords are easy to guess, your systems will be open to data breaches. Make use of upper and lower case letters, numbers and/or symbols when creating passwords.

Encrypt all portable devices:

Make sure all portable devices (such as memory sticks, tablets, laptops) used to store personal information are encrypted.

Lastly, we want to encourage you to get in touch with Compucare, so we can review your IT support plan helping you align with GDPR requirements. Having said that, even if you’re already GDPR compliant, this might be a good time to review your cyber security status. Please refer to our recent blog post:Are SMEs too Small to become Cyber Attack Victims?